Book 2, Chapter 93 - A Second Encounter (1/2)

Cloudhawk immediately wanted to throw the skull away. The fires were like viscous oil, climbing up his arms, filling him with trepidation. There were many times over the last few months that he’d seen otherworldly things, but this was like really being face to face with a ghost!

The fires continued to envelop him. But there was no heat.

In fact it was the opposite. It wasn’t like fire at all, but like shackles of ice slithering over his body. They were ghastly vipers, born from the depths of the earth and slowly sapping the life from him. He couldn’t move, and the hair all over his body stood on end.

When the scarlet flames had encased half his body, they might as well have been hard as cement. Just as Cloudhawk was beginning to fear he’d been locked in forever, the slithering flames seemed to sense something. They all coalesced around his chest and upon touching the phase stone, were sucked inside.

The plain-looking stone drew them in like a sponge, or more precisely, like an insatiable black hole. Not a single bit of the fire from the black skull remained, devoured by the phase stone until even the eternal fires of its eyes went dark.

Cloudhawk’s own eyes turned to the skull, where he watched a change overcome it. The glossy shine was gone from its jade-like surface. All of a sudden it was as though a thousand years passed in an instant. The skull became coarse, parts of it cracked. Fissures continued along the ancient bone until, with a clatter, it broke into several pieces and fell to the ground.

Slowly, Cloudhawk regained his ability to move. He staggered back a few steps the instant his feet would let him. The sound of his heart pounding was deafening.

Something felt different to him now, a sensation centered on his chest. He looked down to see what had been a plain stone, now gradually turning into a brilliant scarlet red. It was as smooth as luminescent as a gemstone now, and an enigmatic power radiated from inside it.

Did something happen? Had the skull somehow broken his precious relic?

He touched it and was rewarded with an intense shock. A sharp pain raced through his brain that caught him off guard, and then his vision went dark. Memories, shards of thoughts, all jumbled and chaotic flooded him in a wild procession. Scenes of war marched across his mind’s eye; flashes of blood and death, all manner of conflicting sounds, thousands of colors all mashed together and impossible to differentiate.

What human brain could cope with so much information? It threatening to rip him apart! If it didn’t kill him, it would certainly drive him mad.

Get out! Get the fuck out of my head!

His response to the overwhelming sights and sounds was angry resistance. In his mind’s eye a shower of meteors came crashing down into his sea of consciousness, stirring up tidal waves. When they sunk into the depths of that dark sea Cloudhawk thought there might be peace, but it was not the end. The falling stones glowed with an intense light. A field of energy hung over everything.

The images conjured by his mind churned like an angry river.

This… it feels like the stone’s powers are activating.

The phasing power came from the stone and not from Cloudhawk, so he had no ability to stop it. His body twisted erratically like it was made of clay, then blinked out of existence.

A familiar feeling washed over him. It was the feeling of passing into another dimension.

Cloudhawk had begun to master the stone’s abilities that allowed him to pass through matter. In essence, the principle was he was half in one dimension and half in another. He was still present, but dislodged. The stone’s field of energy was the culprit.

If an elastic cloth was used to represent the concept of time, then Cloudhawk’s phasing ability was like placing a rock on that cloth. He was still obviously on one side of that cloth as it stretched, but at the same time was not in his own space.

Or like two bridges, one above the other. No matter the flow of traffic above, those drivers were never going to appear on the road below. Although they could see each other, they were only ever projections of each other. Through the stone’s ability to make full use of space, Cloudhawk was able to elude danger.

But that was far from the stone’s only power. In the hands of a real master, the phase stone could penetrate dimensions completely. Returning to the cloth metaphor, at Cloudhawk’s current capabilities he could stretch the cloth but not pass it. If one with enough strength tried, though, they’d slip right through.

Right now, the ability to tread dimensions was beyond him. The few times it’d succeeded was because he’d resonated properly with the power stored in the stone. It was very difficult for him to do that at a whim.

Now, after absorbing whatever was in that skull, the stone was coming alive again.

How could it not take Cloudhawk by surprise?

The power that overcame him sliced Cloudhawk into infinitesimally minute pieces, more than a man could fathom. He was then put together somewhere else, in another reality.

This was not a pleasant experience.

However, after a few experiences Cloudhawk had learned to deal with it. Now he was somewhere draped in darkness and silence. It was a world of ruin.

It had been cleaved into loosely assembled blocks of earth floating around each other, some as large as Skycloud domain. They all floated in an unsettling and empty space but for the twin stars that it orbited. Beyond that, the vast expanse of nothingness and the stars that hid beyond.